6 September 2016

Trump leads Clinton by 13 points in Montana, reports WashPost poll

This cannot be welcome news for Democrats Steve Bullock, Denise Juneau, and their party’s three other Lands Board candidates. An online poll of 999 registered Montana voters conducted 9 August through 1 September shows Trump doing almost as well as Mitt Romney in a two-way match-up. Romney won 55.4 percent of Montana’s vote in 2012.

Washington Post graphic

Trump’s lead holds in a four-way matchup with the Green Party’s Jill Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson. Stein’s share was five percent, yet Clinton’s share dropped seven points, suggesting that some Democrats defected to Johnson.

A margin of error was not calculated for this poll (see the methodology report) because it was not a random sample. That it was not a random sample, however, does not mean that the result is not valid or has such wide error bars as to be useless.

Nationally, the contest is tightening. At FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver surveys the state of the election in Clinton’s Lead Keeps Shrinking. If you do not yet subscribe to FiveThirtyEight’s free newsletter, I recommend signing up for it.